The Internet is the medium that more than any other has literally revolutionized our lives, our relationships, our way of communicating . The Web has created a new world that is " always networked ," constantly interconnected and interdependent , to quote Thompson. It has scaled it down to the point of making it a global village, or even a glocal one, as McLuhan , Robertson, and Bauman would call it.
Little unity, much division
A true cultural and media revolution that has neutralized spaces and distances and blurred the boundaries between content producers and simple consumers. However, the Internet represents a true media paradox , revealing a sort of anomaly that overturns its most intimate meaning: its unifying intent has ultimately become the bearer of profound and potentially unbridgeable divisions . Indeed, what should have brought the world a more humane grandeur, making each individual a sort of Vitruvian Man 3.0, has ultimately done nothing but create ephemeral, highly volatile communities , fragmenting real existences and swallowing them up by virtual ones.
Digital natives and immigrants
The military ARPANET project , applied to the civilian world, has so far exponentially accelerated technological progress, made "real time" the only valid temporal dimension, and compressed thousands of kilometers into the distance between a computer screen and the user's face. However, it has also exacerbated relational, social, and generational divisions: first, it has characterized the so-called " digital divide " between online and offline populations, where the distinction is applied to the lack of infrastructure and poor signal coverage. Then, it has built a robust barrier between digital natives and digital immigrants , as Mark Prensky would say: the former, literate in digital codes, lock themselves in a sort of "internet-like" solipsism, communicating at a different speed and with different languages than the latter, children of the analog era who must adapt to a role, but above all, to a new, complex and essentially unfamiliar environment, due to a different media imprinting.
Parents and children
Finally, perhaps the most significant divide in analyzing this phenomenon is that between parents and children . The former lack basic tools for control and protection, while the latter, digitally skilled and native, are exposed to all the potential threats posed by the web and, more importantly, fail to communicate the resulting critical issues and problems, more or less serious, to anyone. It seems ungenerous and intellectually incorrect, even taking all these factors into account, to demonize the medium or platform that, as a digital embodiment of a social sphere in which good and evil coexist, fosters the dialogue between the two that is evident in our daily lives. It would be equally wrong to glorify the democratizing drive inherent in the Internet, which legitimizes everyone as a hub of ever-changing communication.
Different worlds
However, it is necessary to implement controls at the institutional and legislative levels, but above all to increase metacommunication : that is, the communication of communication itself, not in a miserably self-referential manner, but through effectively dialogic modalities between different actors, between social groups, between cultures, between natives and immigrants, between residents and digital visitors. This dialogue will catalyze exchange so that different worlds can get to know each other, understand their most intrinsic dynamics, and share languages both semantically and symbolically, neutralizing every sterile division and actualizing a true media-communication democracy in a digital world where what is new today will be obsolete tomorrow.
Marino D'Amore
